SINGAPORE – Swiss cultivated meat producer, Mirai Foods, has partnered with Shiok Meats’, a subsidiary of Gaia Foods, to develop and commercialize cultivated beef products in Singapore.
The partnership will see the exchange of know-how and supplies to bring cultivated beef to Singapore, the first and only country to have approved the sale and distribution of cell-based meat.
Singapore’s Shiok Foods is working to accelerate cultivated beef to market with one-of-a-kind bovine muscle and fat stem cells supplied from Mirai Foods.
According to the companies, these essential building blocks for cultivated beef are natural, pure, and non-genetically modified cells from premium cattle breeds.
Mirai Foods is currently the only cell-based food tech player in Switzerland and stands as one of the few globally that do not use any genetic manipulation or engineering in the process, but instead “keeps the cells as they naturally occur in the animal”.
While Mirai is providing tools to enable Shiok to speed to market, Shiok is bringing regulatory information and know-how to the Swiss food tech company.
Sandhya Sriram, Group CEO at Shiok Meats and Gaia Foods, said the new partnership is the result of a strong relationship developing with Mirai.
Sriram stated: “Whilst we will leverage our regulatory status and expertise to help Mirai accelerate its market entry in Singapore, we are also eyeing on potential production and distribution of our seafood products in Switzerland, a high purchasing power market with a strong first adoption mindset.”
Accordingly, Christoph Mayr, CEO of Mirai Foods commented that partnering with a Singaporean company is particularly interesting for Mirai Foods given the country’s strong distribution and partnership network across the Asia Pacific region, which has been showing a growing appetite for safe, high-quality beef.
Shiok Meats has always been collaborating with established seafood companies and hatcheries to add variety to the portfolio and food security narrative through aquaculture innovation, research, and tech transfer.
Late last month, Shiok partnered with Vietnam’s Minh Phu Seafood to develop a combined R&D facility to help bring cultivated seafood to Asia.
In a statement, the cultivated meat and seafood company said its satellite R&D facility in Vietnam will focus on high-quality cultivated shrimp research and technology.
To date, there are around 20 companies developing lab-grown meat and plant-based protein set up in Singapore, which is fast becoming Asia’s most important food-technology hub.
What is propelling the cultivated meat market to grow in the country is not only favorable regulation but also the acceptance of consumers that cultivated meat is better for the environment, as consuming less animal meat means there is less demand for livestock, which is a huge source of GHG emissions.
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